I remember the early hours of Aug. 31, 1997 very clearly. At first, the breaking news was that of an accident: Dodi Fayed had died and Diana, Princess of Wales, was critical in hospital. We were glued to our TV screens, waiting. By dawn we knew she had died. By noon the first conspiracy theories were making the rounds.
Why? Why could it not have been an accident? Why was there an immediate almost blind unwillingness to believe it could have been a random tragedy? It was almost as if it was too normal, too ordinary. The death of someone as famous as Diana could not be a simple traffic accident; that was far too straightforward a narrative. What was needed was something worthy of a novel or, even better, a soap opera that could be delivered episode by episode.
She was young, beautiful and glamorous. She was also at a turning point in her life, gone was the darkness and desperation of the years immediately following her divorce, here was a radiant Diana, in love, in control, in hope. This made her death all the more tragic and shocking. Fate dealt too tragic a blow. Perhaps we do not want to believe that death strikes just when life is at its most beautiful, though evidently it does. We crave other explanations, ones that move the tragedy from being random — and as such something which could strike any of us at any time — to something unnatural and evil such as murder, which by definition is far less likely to happen to us mere mortals but which also allows us to vent our anger. The conspiracy theories enable us to lay blame. Someone could be made responsible for her death, even if that someone was at first as hazy as “they”.
In the Arab and Muslim world, we are addicted to conspiracy theories. Take any event, start a conversation and within minutes a number of conspiracies will start to take shape as surely as there is smoke in the air from the “shishas” and “arghilas” we love to smoke. Perhaps as a people we have been gifted with creativity and excessively fertile imaginations — though our current paltry output of literary fiction, film and theater makes that assertion painfully hard to believe. The root is more likely to be found in a deep distrust for the authority of the official line. In other words, we believe in disinformation rather than information. At its most farcical it can be represented by someone like Iraq’s former Minister of Information Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahhaf, quickly dubbed “Comical Ali” in the West, who even as American tanks were entering Baghdad was speaking of the impending defeat of the US-led forces.
In the case of Diana’s death there was something more than the usual story spinning which accompanies any celebrity death, there was the shadow of culture clash. Well before 9/11 and the polarization of the last few years, Muslims were unwilling to believe that “the Establishment” would let the most famous woman in the world marry a Muslim. The notion that the British royal family could accept that the future king of England could have a Muslim stepfather and Muslim half-brothers and sisters was not just inconceivable but plain unpalatable. What does it say about the Muslim view of the world that so many of us are willing to believe that the royal family would resort to murder in order to prevent the future king of England from being related by blood to a Muslim?
Enter Mohammed Fayed stage left. What was smoke became concrete, the conspiracies, the allegations, the questions; he built them up into a pyramid to lay at the feet of those he thought responsible for his son’s death. The narrative was tightened and the detail ironed out: The Duke of Edinburgh ordered the British secret service to kill Diana and Dodi because they were about to announce their engagement and because Diana was pregnant with Dodi’s child. Many people are more willing to believe this version of events than the official version: Diana died because the driver of her car was drunk and lost control of the car. In Britain, a survey earlier this month found that only 43 percent of people questioned believed her death was an accident. No doubt a similar survey on the proverbial Arab Street would find an even higher proportion of people willing to believe that her death was anything but an accident.
It is this weight of public opinion or public mistrust that led to the Stevens enquiry, which published its report on Friday. It has taken three years and cost the British taxpayer £3.69 million. Lord Stevens is the former head of the Metropolitan Police. Along with his team of 12 detectives, he painstakingly reconstructed every detail of Diana’s death, interviewing 300 witnesses in the process and collecting more than 600 pieces of evidence. The 832-page report comes to the same conclusion as the 6,000 page report published by the French authorities following their investigation of the princess’s death: A tragic accident.
Lord Stevens is no doubt a man of integrity and someone with enough gravitas to warrant public trust but will his report change anyone’s mind? To some extent yes. The report goes some way towards dispelling some of the myths surrounding the princess’s death. For instance it lays compelling evidence that Diana was not pregnant at the time of her death. It also — as Lord Stevens himself admitted — accepts that there are some questions we will never know the answer to. Questions such as who was driving the white Fiat Uno that made a “glancing impact” into the Mercedes Diana and Dodi were traveling in before the Mercedes spun out of control and crashed into the 13th pillar of the Pont de l’Alma? This car has never been found and probably never will be.
The truth is those who believe the “establishment” killed Diana will never be convinced by the findings of a report produced by the very “establishment” they hold responsible for Diana’s death. What this report has done however is destroyed Mohammed Fayed’s credibility. As the grieving father he has been allowed to make incendiary accusations about some of the most powerful people in Britain without fear of legal action or recrimination but those days are at an end. It is likely he will find it increasingly hard to make his case.
Already he is being painted as something of a buffoon, someone whose grief has made him lose the plot. And maybe he has. But whatever you believe, surely the time has come to let Diana, Dodi and their driver Henry Paul rest in peace.
